Attendance Concerns

[Supernaut]

52 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

Of course!

 

You posted a stupid statement. Did you not expect to be taken to task for it?

How is it stupid? 

[Wolverinebass]

1 hour ago, BigRedX said:

 

Unless they are playing music that is only going to appeal to a very minority audience they must be doing something wrong. Maybe "headlining" before they have grown an audience that will support it. IMO until you have at least one album out that is selling and/or streaming well your band is not ready to headline a gig. You need to have 40-45 minutes of music that at least half the audience is going to be familiar with. 

 

The other thing is are they playing where the audiences are? These days for an unsigned or small-label band London is just another city with nothing that makes it any more or less special than any other city. Go where your audience is or at least where there are promotors for your genre. Otherwise you will end up playing the same few places to the same few people and run the possibility of outstaying your welcome.

What does streaming well entail? I'm curious now. Would say, getting under 100 monthly listeners suggest you should pack it in? 

 

I agree some bands are trying to run before they can walk, others, I would say the needle won't move for them and I don't believe that's because they're useless or have crap material, as they don't. I would say that's because not as many people go to live shows unless it's someone or something they know. A few do better out of London, others not.

 

If one can't find fans in London which has twice the population of Scotland, I think honestly anyone will have a hard time of it.

[Leonard Smalls]

In some places it's almost impossible to find an audience for an originals band...

Frinstance, round here there's no proper venues and folks don't seem want to come out  - I remember seeing an awesome prog band rather weirdly playing in my local boozer (I'm not really a prog fan, but these guys were just serious quality musicians). There were 4 of us in there and maybe 50 outside completely ignoring the band - it wasn't loud so that wasn't it. One of the outside folks actually came up to me and asked what they were like rather than staying and listening for himself.

As a result, any originals bands will never get a local audience because locals won't see anything they don't know already so it's a proper Catch 22.

However, when "Lady DJ" comes to the same pub to play all the hits it's absolutely rammed with drunken folks singing along to all those songs I can't stand.

 

[BigRedX]

9 minutes ago, Leonard Smalls said:

In some places it's almost impossible to find an audience for an originals band...

Frinstance, round here there's no proper venues and folks don't seem want to come out  - I remember seeing an awesome prog band rather weirdly playing in my local boozer (I'm not really a prog fan, but these guys were just serious quality musicians). There were 4 of us in there and maybe 50 outside completely ignoring the band - it wasn't loud so that wasn't it. One of the outside folks actually came up to me and asked what they were like rather than staying and listening for himself.

As a result, any originals bands will never get a local audience because locals won't see anything they don't know already so it's a proper Catch 22.

However, when "Lady DJ" comes to the same pub to play all the hits it's absolutely rammed with drunken folks singing along to all those songs I can't stand.

 

As I said before, if your band isn't based somewhere where there is an audience for your music then you need to go and play places where there is. And if you're a band going to play an unknown venue out of town do some research to make sure that it has an audience and one that is likely to be appreciative of what you do. If you are not based in at least a decent sized town then it would be naive to expect much of a local audience for any originals band.

 

In the early days of The Terrortones after we'd called in a couple of favours due from Mr Venom's previous band, local gigs weren't that easy to come by. However there were plenty of venues and promotors in other parts of the country who wanted to put us on and were prepared to pay us enough to make the travelling worthwhile. It wasn't until we started putting on the monthly "Dick Venom Presents…" gigs where we would book someone better known in a compatible genre and play support that we started to build up a local following.

[BigRedX]

39 minutes ago, Wolverinebass said:

What does streaming well entail? I'm curious now. Would say, getting under 100 monthly listeners suggest you should pack it in? 

 

I agree some bands are trying to run before they can walk, others, I would say the needle won't move for them and I don't believe that's because they're useless or have crap material, as they don't. I would say that's because not as many people go to live shows unless it's someone or something they know. A few do better out of London, others not.

 

If one can't find fans in London which has twice the population of Scotland, I think honestly anyone will have a hard time of it.

 

My current band who are hardly a well-known Goth band manage an average of 2500 streams a month on Spotify alone. While that's split between 14 tracks about 75% of those streams come from our most popular 5 songs. I would suggest that we're not quite popular enough to headline without one or more other bands of at least an equivalent standing as support. 

[Dad3353]

Nevertheless, there are only so many venues, days (evenings...) of the week, and folk wanting to go out and listen to/watch a live band, and a fair number of original and covers bands, or multiple genres, courting those ever reducing number of slots. It would appear that the butter is being spread ever thinner on fewer slices; this trend is not likely to reverse, in the UK, soon. Just sayin'.

[Leonard Smalls]

12 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

you need to go and play places where there is

We'd kind of spotted that...

The nearest we play to home is Hereford (nearly an hour away) where we get a decent audience. However, if you just bimble a bit further into town there's a venue called Gordon Bennetts which gets absolutely rammed. And it's full of pissed up folks singing along to "Wonderwall" and the like. Those same people wouldn't dream of going to see a band they hadn't heard of in a grassroots venue because they wouldn't hear anything they knew, without realising that those same grassroots venues are the places that gave the likes of Oasis their first gigs.